The Paula Principle

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

An unusual glass ceiling

Here's a rather unusual story of someone hitting the glass ceiling, recounted to me recently by John himself.  No further comment needed.  But if anyone can point me to a good pictorial representation of the glass ceiling, I'd be really grateful. John was a miner in the Llynfi valley in South Wales.   After ten years of working with machinery he became a fitter, “a spanner being lighter than a shovel”.  Then he hit what he called a glass ceiling - an unusual application of the image, given firstly that he’s a man and secondly that he was working underground... Anyway, he applied for a job teaching first aid, at a…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

The Group: vertical social capital, and choice

I've just finished Mary McCarthy's remarkable  1960s novel.   The group is one of Vassar graduates, so they are at the elite end of educated women, and they are closely bonded;  they celebrate each other's weddings, and offer support of a kind to each other on relationship and marriage issues. I picked it up thinking it might illustrate Paula Principle Factor 4 - that women lack the vertical networks to enable them to progress in their careers as fast as they might. McCarthy offers us a colourful palette of characters, from independent (Polly)  to submissive (Kay),  baby-focussed (Priss) to lesbian (Lakey), and so on.   They are introduced to us at Kay's marriage to Harald, the…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Japan’s glass ceiling

Today's Financial Times reports that Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, moved yesterday to compel corporate Japan to promote more women. He asked them to set themselves a target - of at least one woman executive per company. As the Ft wrily remarks: "The request was polite and the scale was hardly European in ambition." In Japan women fill just 1.6% of executive roles (the European figure is 14%), so if even half of them they comply with their prime minister's wish it would mark a big jump forward. It's part of a wider tension within Japan about the role of women in the economy. This is powered in part by…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

An unusual glass ceiling

Here's a rather unusual story of someone hitting the glass ceiling, recounted to me recently by John himself.  No further comment needed.  But if anyone can point me to a good pictorial representation of the glass ceiling, I'd be really grateful. John was a miner in the Llynfi valley in South Wales.   After ten years of working with machinery he became a fitter, “a spanner being lighter than a shovel”.  Then he hit what he called a glass ceiling - an unusual application of the image, given firstly that he’s a man and secondly that he was working underground... Anyway, he applied for a job teaching first aid, at a…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

The Group: vertical social capital, and choice

I've just finished Mary McCarthy's remarkable  1960s novel.   The group is one of Vassar graduates, so they are at the elite end of educated women, and they are closely bonded;  they celebrate each other's weddings, and offer support of a kind to each other on relationship and marriage issues. I picked it up thinking it might illustrate Paula Principle Factor 4 - that women lack the vertical networks to enable them to progress in their careers as fast as they might. McCarthy offers us a colourful palette of characters, from independent (Polly)  to submissive (Kay),  baby-focussed (Priss) to lesbian (Lakey), and so on.   They are introduced to us at Kay's marriage to Harald, the…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Japan’s glass ceiling

Today's Financial Times reports that Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, moved yesterday to compel corporate Japan to promote more women. He asked them to set themselves a target - of at least one woman executive per company. As the Ft wrily remarks: "The request was polite and the scale was hardly European in ambition." In Japan women fill just 1.6% of executive roles (the European figure is 14%), so if even half of them they comply with their prime minister's wish it would mark a big jump forward. It's part of a wider tension within Japan about the role of women in the economy. This is powered in part by…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

An unusual glass ceiling

Here's a rather unusual story of someone hitting the glass ceiling, recounted to me recently by John himself.  No further comment needed.  But if anyone can point me to a good pictorial representation of the glass ceiling, I'd be really grateful. John was a miner in the Llynfi valley in South Wales.   After ten years of working with machinery he became a fitter, “a spanner being lighter than a shovel”.  Then he hit what he called a glass ceiling - an unusual application of the image, given firstly that he’s a man and secondly that he was working underground... Anyway, he applied for a job teaching first aid, at a…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

The Group: vertical social capital, and choice

I've just finished Mary McCarthy's remarkable  1960s novel.   The group is one of Vassar graduates, so they are at the elite end of educated women, and they are closely bonded;  they celebrate each other's weddings, and offer support of a kind to each other on relationship and marriage issues. I picked it up thinking it might illustrate Paula Principle Factor 4 - that women lack the vertical networks to enable them to progress in their careers as fast as they might. McCarthy offers us a colourful palette of characters, from independent (Polly)  to submissive (Kay),  baby-focussed (Priss) to lesbian (Lakey), and so on.   They are introduced to us at Kay's marriage to Harald, the…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Japan’s glass ceiling

Today's Financial Times reports that Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, moved yesterday to compel corporate Japan to promote more women. He asked them to set themselves a target - of at least one woman executive per company. As the Ft wrily remarks: "The request was polite and the scale was hardly European in ambition." In Japan women fill just 1.6% of executive roles (the European figure is 14%), so if even half of them they comply with their prime minister's wish it would mark a big jump forward. It's part of a wider tension within Japan about the role of women in the economy. This is powered in part by…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

An unusual glass ceiling

Here's a rather unusual story of someone hitting the glass ceiling, recounted to me recently by John himself.  No further comment needed.  But if anyone can point me to a good pictorial representation of the glass ceiling, I'd be really grateful. John was a miner in the Llynfi valley in South Wales.   After ten years of working with machinery he became a fitter, “a spanner being lighter than a shovel”.  Then he hit what he called a glass ceiling - an unusual application of the image, given firstly that he’s a man and secondly that he was working underground... Anyway, he applied for a job teaching first aid, at a…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

The Group: vertical social capital, and choice

I've just finished Mary McCarthy's remarkable  1960s novel.   The group is one of Vassar graduates, so they are at the elite end of educated women, and they are closely bonded;  they celebrate each other's weddings, and offer support of a kind to each other on relationship and marriage issues. I picked it up thinking it might illustrate Paula Principle Factor 4 - that women lack the vertical networks to enable them to progress in their careers as fast as they might. McCarthy offers us a colourful palette of characters, from independent (Polly)  to submissive (Kay),  baby-focussed (Priss) to lesbian (Lakey), and so on.   They are introduced to us at Kay's marriage to Harald, the…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Japan’s glass ceiling

Today's Financial Times reports that Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, moved yesterday to compel corporate Japan to promote more women. He asked them to set themselves a target - of at least one woman executive per company. As the Ft wrily remarks: "The request was polite and the scale was hardly European in ambition." In Japan women fill just 1.6% of executive roles (the European figure is 14%), so if even half of them they comply with their prime minister's wish it would mark a big jump forward. It's part of a wider tension within Japan about the role of women in the economy. This is powered in part by…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

An unusual glass ceiling

Here's a rather unusual story of someone hitting the glass ceiling, recounted to me recently by John himself.  No further comment needed.  But if anyone can point me to a good pictorial representation of the glass ceiling, I'd be really grateful. John was a miner in the Llynfi valley in South Wales.   After ten years of working with machinery he became a fitter, “a spanner being lighter than a shovel”.  Then he hit what he called a glass ceiling - an unusual application of the image, given firstly that he’s a man and secondly that he was working underground... Anyway, he applied for a job teaching first aid, at a…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

The Group: vertical social capital, and choice

I've just finished Mary McCarthy's remarkable  1960s novel.   The group is one of Vassar graduates, so they are at the elite end of educated women, and they are closely bonded;  they celebrate each other's weddings, and offer support of a kind to each other on relationship and marriage issues. I picked it up thinking it might illustrate Paula Principle Factor 4 - that women lack the vertical networks to enable them to progress in their careers as fast as they might. McCarthy offers us a colourful palette of characters, from independent (Polly)  to submissive (Kay),  baby-focussed (Priss) to lesbian (Lakey), and so on.   They are introduced to us at Kay's marriage to Harald, the…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Japan’s glass ceiling

Today's Financial Times reports that Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, moved yesterday to compel corporate Japan to promote more women. He asked them to set themselves a target - of at least one woman executive per company. As the Ft wrily remarks: "The request was polite and the scale was hardly European in ambition." In Japan women fill just 1.6% of executive roles (the European figure is 14%), so if even half of them they comply with their prime minister's wish it would mark a big jump forward. It's part of a wider tension within Japan about the role of women in the economy. This is powered in part by…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

An unusual glass ceiling

Here's a rather unusual story of someone hitting the glass ceiling, recounted to me recently by John himself.  No further comment needed.  But if anyone can point me to a good pictorial representation of the glass ceiling, I'd be really grateful. John was a miner in the Llynfi valley in South Wales.   After ten years of working with machinery he became a fitter, “a spanner being lighter than a shovel”.  Then he hit what he called a glass ceiling - an unusual application of the image, given firstly that he’s a man and secondly that he was working underground... Anyway, he applied for a job teaching first aid, at a…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

The Group: vertical social capital, and choice

I've just finished Mary McCarthy's remarkable  1960s novel.   The group is one of Vassar graduates, so they are at the elite end of educated women, and they are closely bonded;  they celebrate each other's weddings, and offer support of a kind to each other on relationship and marriage issues. I picked it up thinking it might illustrate Paula Principle Factor 4 - that women lack the vertical networks to enable them to progress in their careers as fast as they might. McCarthy offers us a colourful palette of characters, from independent (Polly)  to submissive (Kay),  baby-focussed (Priss) to lesbian (Lakey), and so on.   They are introduced to us at Kay's marriage to Harald, the…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Japan’s glass ceiling

Today's Financial Times reports that Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, moved yesterday to compel corporate Japan to promote more women. He asked them to set themselves a target - of at least one woman executive per company. As the Ft wrily remarks: "The request was polite and the scale was hardly European in ambition." In Japan women fill just 1.6% of executive roles (the European figure is 14%), so if even half of them they comply with their prime minister's wish it would mark a big jump forward. It's part of a wider tension within Japan about the role of women in the economy. This is powered in part by…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

An unusual glass ceiling

Here's a rather unusual story of someone hitting the glass ceiling, recounted to me recently by John himself.  No further comment needed.  But if anyone can point me to a good pictorial representation of the glass ceiling, I'd be really grateful. John was a miner in the Llynfi valley in South Wales.   After ten years of working with machinery he became a fitter, “a spanner being lighter than a shovel”.  Then he hit what he called a glass ceiling - an unusual application of the image, given firstly that he’s a man and secondly that he was working underground... Anyway, he applied for a job teaching first aid, at a…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

The Group: vertical social capital, and choice

I've just finished Mary McCarthy's remarkable  1960s novel.   The group is one of Vassar graduates, so they are at the elite end of educated women, and they are closely bonded;  they celebrate each other's weddings, and offer support of a kind to each other on relationship and marriage issues. I picked it up thinking it might illustrate Paula Principle Factor 4 - that women lack the vertical networks to enable them to progress in their careers as fast as they might. McCarthy offers us a colourful palette of characters, from independent (Polly)  to submissive (Kay),  baby-focussed (Priss) to lesbian (Lakey), and so on.   They are introduced to us at Kay's marriage to Harald, the…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Japan’s glass ceiling

Today's Financial Times reports that Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, moved yesterday to compel corporate Japan to promote more women. He asked them to set themselves a target - of at least one woman executive per company. As the Ft wrily remarks: "The request was polite and the scale was hardly European in ambition." In Japan women fill just 1.6% of executive roles (the European figure is 14%), so if even half of them they comply with their prime minister's wish it would mark a big jump forward. It's part of a wider tension within Japan about the role of women in the economy. This is powered in part by…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

An unusual glass ceiling

Here's a rather unusual story of someone hitting the glass ceiling, recounted to me recently by John himself.  No further comment needed.  But if anyone can point me to a good pictorial representation of the glass ceiling, I'd be really grateful. John was a miner in the Llynfi valley in South Wales.   After ten years of working with machinery he became a fitter, “a spanner being lighter than a shovel”.  Then he hit what he called a glass ceiling - an unusual application of the image, given firstly that he’s a man and secondly that he was working underground... Anyway, he applied for a job teaching first aid, at a…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

The Group: vertical social capital, and choice

I've just finished Mary McCarthy's remarkable  1960s novel.   The group is one of Vassar graduates, so they are at the elite end of educated women, and they are closely bonded;  they celebrate each other's weddings, and offer support of a kind to each other on relationship and marriage issues. I picked it up thinking it might illustrate Paula Principle Factor 4 - that women lack the vertical networks to enable them to progress in their careers as fast as they might. McCarthy offers us a colourful palette of characters, from independent (Polly)  to submissive (Kay),  baby-focussed (Priss) to lesbian (Lakey), and so on.   They are introduced to us at Kay's marriage to Harald, the…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Japan’s glass ceiling

Today's Financial Times reports that Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, moved yesterday to compel corporate Japan to promote more women. He asked them to set themselves a target - of at least one woman executive per company. As the Ft wrily remarks: "The request was polite and the scale was hardly European in ambition." In Japan women fill just 1.6% of executive roles (the European figure is 14%), so if even half of them they comply with their prime minister's wish it would mark a big jump forward. It's part of a wider tension within Japan about the role of women in the economy. This is powered in part by…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

An unusual glass ceiling

Here's a rather unusual story of someone hitting the glass ceiling, recounted to me recently by John himself.  No further comment needed.  But if anyone can point me to a good pictorial representation of the glass ceiling, I'd be really grateful. John was a miner in the Llynfi valley in South Wales.   After ten years of working with machinery he became a fitter, “a spanner being lighter than a shovel”.  Then he hit what he called a glass ceiling - an unusual application of the image, given firstly that he’s a man and secondly that he was working underground... Anyway, he applied for a job teaching first aid, at a…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

The Group: vertical social capital, and choice

I've just finished Mary McCarthy's remarkable  1960s novel.   The group is one of Vassar graduates, so they are at the elite end of educated women, and they are closely bonded;  they celebrate each other's weddings, and offer support of a kind to each other on relationship and marriage issues. I picked it up thinking it might illustrate Paula Principle Factor 4 - that women lack the vertical networks to enable them to progress in their careers as fast as they might. McCarthy offers us a colourful palette of characters, from independent (Polly)  to submissive (Kay),  baby-focussed (Priss) to lesbian (Lakey), and so on.   They are introduced to us at Kay's marriage to Harald, the…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Japan’s glass ceiling

Today's Financial Times reports that Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, moved yesterday to compel corporate Japan to promote more women. He asked them to set themselves a target - of at least one woman executive per company. As the Ft wrily remarks: "The request was polite and the scale was hardly European in ambition." In Japan women fill just 1.6% of executive roles (the European figure is 14%), so if even half of them they comply with their prime minister's wish it would mark a big jump forward. It's part of a wider tension within Japan about the role of women in the economy. This is powered in part by…
Read More

Noncogs

Noncogs is short for non-cognitive skills, and I've just been at an OECD meeting where my former colleague Koji Miyamoto is preparing for some longitudinal studies to  measure these in several different countries.  Noncogs are, obviously, distinguished from cognitive skills, both general ones such as reasoning and analytical skills and specific ones such as subject-related skills (mathematical, linguistic etc).  Noncogs include the capacity to concentrate on medium- or long-term goals, perseverance, the ability to deal with setbacks and the capacity to interact well with others. There is increasing evidence that in many contexts noncogs are as important as cogs, if not more so.  (We should always remember that the two categories are not watertight, and interact…
Read More

Bell Jars

My book group (all men) discussed Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last week.   I can't remember how we chose this - we alternate fiction and non-fiction, with a strict system for proposing options for our next session, and I think I must have missed the relevant session when BJ was chosen  - but it turned out to be one of our best discussions, partly because of our very varying attitudes to the book.  Some of us appreciated its style but didn't like the content (notably, as they saw it, her dislike of almost very character), some found it extraordinary in itself and doubly so given the author's own suicide, and others couldn't respond  to it at…
Read More

Counting them out….

COUNTING THEM IN AND OUT Elizabeth Blackwell was the world’s first trained and registered woman doctor.  This would in itself be a remarkable achievement, but when you add in the fact that she lost the sight of one eye in the early stages of her training (treating a baby infected with an infectious form of ophthalmia), and that she had to move between the US, England and France to attain her goal, it puts her into an altogether different league. I’ve been reading her story in Margaret Foster’s enthralling account of eight early pioneers of feminism, Significant Sisters.  One 0f the clever things about the book is the way Forster tells the individual…
Read More

Othello, qualifications and stereotypes

I went last week to the National Theatre's imaginative production of Othello.   It is set in modern times,  kicking off with Roderigo and Iago holding a cigarette conversation outside a pub.  The second half takes place  in Iraq or Afghanistan, with everyone in contemporary military garb, boots, camouflage gear and so on, and the scenes taking place in messrooms, sterile military offices and even washrooms and toilets.    It works very well, for the most part. That initial conversation takes us very swiftly into the plot.  It is immediately clear that Iago's resentment stems not just from being passed over for promotion to Othello's lieutenant, but from the fact that the position has been given…
Read More

An unusual glass ceiling

Here's a rather unusual story of someone hitting the glass ceiling, recounted to me recently by John himself.  No further comment needed.  But if anyone can point me to a good pictorial representation of the glass ceiling, I'd be really grateful. John was a miner in the Llynfi valley in South Wales.   After ten years of working with machinery he became a fitter, “a spanner being lighter than a shovel”.  Then he hit what he called a glass ceiling - an unusual application of the image, given firstly that he’s a man and secondly that he was working underground... Anyway, he applied for a job teaching first aid, at a…
Read More

The XX Factor

Alison Wolf’s new book, The XX  Factor, is jam-packed with juicy items, enough to keep book groups and academic seminars in discussion mode for many hours. The sub-title, ‘how working women are creating a new society’, is a little misleading.  Wolf focuses above all on women with top-end education.   They are an elite, though when they are all put together there are a lot of them.   She estimates these to be 15-20% of the population in most developed countries, amounting to some 70 million worldwide. They are educated at  universities with high reputations, and they have high career aspirations.  At the heart of the book is the argument that these…
Read More

The Group: vertical social capital, and choice

I've just finished Mary McCarthy's remarkable  1960s novel.   The group is one of Vassar graduates, so they are at the elite end of educated women, and they are closely bonded;  they celebrate each other's weddings, and offer support of a kind to each other on relationship and marriage issues. I picked it up thinking it might illustrate Paula Principle Factor 4 - that women lack the vertical networks to enable them to progress in their careers as fast as they might. McCarthy offers us a colourful palette of characters, from independent (Polly)  to submissive (Kay),  baby-focussed (Priss) to lesbian (Lakey), and so on.   They are introduced to us at Kay's marriage to Harald, the…
Read More

great expectations, and household divisions

The recent excellent report from IPPR on gender issues has immediate attractions for me. It's great to see a thinktank using longitudinal data, as Tess Lanning and her colleagues do. They compare the experiences of women born in 1958 with those of the 1970 generation, and this gives us a powerful take on trends. They rightly warn against seeing any tidy linear progression towards greater equality. In particular, we can see major divisions opening up between top and bottom, amongst women as more generally. One illustration of this is the changes in the amount of domestic work done by men; this has increased over time - but mainly amongst men with more education.…
Read More

Japan’s glass ceiling

Today's Financial Times reports that Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, moved yesterday to compel corporate Japan to promote more women. He asked them to set themselves a target - of at least one woman executive per company. As the Ft wrily remarks: "The request was polite and the scale was hardly European in ambition." In Japan women fill just 1.6% of executive roles (the European figure is 14%), so if even half of them they comply with their prime minister's wish it would mark a big jump forward. It's part of a wider tension within Japan about the role of women in the economy. This is powered in part by…
Read More